“It looks very handsome with mown walkways but leaving the cowslips. Also the new tree plantings make excellent sheltered hot spots for butterflies “I really appreciate the attention spent on our area and the local wildlife.” Rushcliffe householder, Collington Way April 2022
Above: long view of our meadow looking toward Rushcliffe Arena April 2022 (Streetwise)
Looking at the history and strong service history of Streetwise I thought about how the loss of trust and respect between contractors and their clients across society could be addressed.
In a media environment where we’ve reeled from Covid out to Orgreave to Hillsborough, from infected blood scandal to Windrush to Grenfell to the Post Office to victims and prisoners, the shadow of these big social harms are burnt into people’s minds. You may ‘switch off’ from the news but you’re a human being and you’re curious but affected by this shadow. The poet TS Eliot observed: between the spasm and the desire falls the shadow….
To me ‘the shadow’ is the detail of why the person who does your garden always mows over the wild flowers and ‘doesn’t listen, doesn’t seem to care’. Why there isn’t the time and space in the transaction to tell them, why there isn’t time to communicate.
That’s how/why someone took the time to contact Streetwise about what they did with the little meadow behind Collington Way in West Bridgford. YES! that person thought, ‘I know what they’ve done here: they’ve added to the common good‘.
Our country, like the things we grow, needs nurture: the lack of oxygen for the pure joy of doing a job with purpose and reciprocity from our colleagues, our managers and our customers has been in short supply.
It’s lowered our expectations and our immune systems (noted as far back as 2003 in New Scientist) about who we are, the sheer mystery and wonder of life and our potential.
Our knowledge and imagination of how infrastructure is managed and repaired has shrunk because the stories of how the contracted out management of that infrastructure has been disappeared in the same way that until Covid we invisibilised the precariously working/housed people who dropped off our takeaways on bike, scooter or car: these jobs became tasks: something that happens as if by magic.
Seeing the Streetwise people, the teams working across Bridgford I realised how much local visual representation of life in the neighbourhood, people working to unblock and repair the drains, the roads, look after the trees, hedgerows, parks, public spaces has been missing.
We’ve got out of the habit of appreciating the consistent work people do, but not only that the abilities and skills that help people keep a sense of proportion and balance in their lives.
A couple of weeks ago on the way back from an early morning shopping trip I met Streetwise’s Deano Thomas who’d just finished mowing around the trees leading to Rushcliffe Arena.
Above: Light shining on an ordinary Friday 13th 2024 Rushcliffe Deano Thomas Streetwise
The light was great, he was cheerful, full of beans: he explained that the team were creating a wildlife area around the trees, they’d been cutting down around the borough. He’d been out early and was just finishing collecting grass.
Deano explained that he’d worked for Streetwise since 2006, starting in litter picking moving on to gardening after six or seven years. I noticed his patience and had a sense that he knew how to have an interested conversation, was used to building relationships with people.
Our ten minute conversation went back in time: Deano grew up around the corner from Bridgford in Wilford then moved to Bilborough going to Glenbrook Primary School and Glaisdale comprehensive school (check out Chris Richard’s memories of the school).
Deano’s dad was a musician and at thirteen Deano took lessons at the Yamaha Music School Bobbers Mill before starting gigging at sixteen with his dad in 1985 the two keyboardists playing clubs everywhere from the local to Whitlock, Oadby and across the UK.
His first job was on the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) training as a textile cutter (YTS was an apprenticeship type work based learning scheme created after the 1981 riots as a means of beginning to meet the skills needs of working class young people).
It worked for Deano: he found a job as a Textile Cutter with Riche Fashions Garden St Radford (which is now residential housing) working there from 1985 to 2006 when the business closed.
As a young skilled worker (and evening and weekend musician) he must have thought his energy and fame had spread and this is what fame is when at a Leicester gig near a church over five hundred people milled across to hear them play. It was pure coincidental serendipity: Deano and his dad’s 1985 Leicester gig just happened to be across the road from the packed church where Willie Thorne (snooker champion) was getting married to Fiona Walker.
Between 1988-89 gigging and working in his full time job he began to be offered work on cruise ships. He’d have loved to have gone but it was one of those missed opportunities, he was working so turned it down.
Thinking back to 1985 the national rate of unemployment was 13.8%. When we think forty years later how just as then there was a country divided and picking itself back up, where people like Deano and his dad just put their heads down and got on with it.
signsofanopencity 
You must be logged in to post a comment.